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Last week, Danny Sullivan wrote at Search Engine Land that Google has brokered a deal with several major news wire services and will be hosting these news articles on Google's own web pages rather than on individual news aggregator websites. With this announcement, Google is also promising better duplicate story detection so that readers don't come across the same exact story more than once.
WebmasterWorld members are so far unimpressed with the changes; perhaps it will be an acquired taste.
I can see this in the UK at the moment. The actual Google-hosted pages (at ap.google.com/article/) are kinda strange - they feel like a bit of a dead-end. True, there are links to other AP sites (and to the Google News results) but it certainly provides a different experience from a 'real' news website.
As an example, I pulled up this AP news article. I can definitely see where he's coming from. It needs to be dressed up a little more to feel more "newsy" to me.
Other news providers are worried about this change because they feel that Google News stories will take priority and they will not get as much traffic.
I would imagine if Google are now becoming a publisher of news that it will mean less traffic to other sites, especially those using the same agencies, which most do for breaking news.
This is especially true if duplicate stories are now going to be removed from Google News.
Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.
